Labor is like motherhood to most of our political leaders: a calling so fine and noble that it would be sullied by talk of vulgar, mundane things like pay.

No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.

There is a reason why America produced the most vigorous feminist movement in the world: We were one of the only countries in which the middle class (which is wealthy by world standards) customarily employed its own women as domestic servants.

Money does not bring happiness' - only the wherewithal, perhaps, to endure its absence.

We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles...bot h of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.

Well I do think there are people who are habitually negative and depressed and take the opposite approach because they imagine the worst, and their minds become dominated by that. They let their own emotions and expectations transform their perceptions of the world.

Cheerfulness, up to and including delusion and false hope, has a recognized place in medicine.